Curriculum as mindfully lived in relationships

Abstract

In the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, this co‐authored paper grew out of a graduate course on mindfulness and an extended inquiry into what it means to cultivate mindful relationships in curriculum as lived experience. Centring three graduate students' experiential projects, including two projects of interactions with nature and one project of interpersonal interactions, this paper demonstrates the process of practicing mindfulness from students' perspectives as individual inquiry, a process that was filled with curves and frustrations as well as revelations and potentiality. The teacher educator created pedagogical conditions but the students enacted their own curriculum in their lived experience of forming mindful relationships. A further layer of inquiry was conducted in the conversations among the three graduate students and the teacher educator, from which shared meanings of time, self‐understanding, gender and making connections across difference emerged. A reconstructed conversation was composed to demonstrate this inquiry process. Curriculum as lived experience, including curriculum as a complicated conversation, is the orientation for this individual and group inquiry. This study shows that curriculum as mindfully lived in relationship is an emergent process of cultivating both deepened self‐understanding and relational attunement, sustained through a lived body, lived time and space, and lived connections across difference. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)